


Duty

by a_verysmallviolet



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 22:12:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1999842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_verysmallviolet/pseuds/a_verysmallviolet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wife's duty is to follow her husband wherever he goes; a mother's, to follow her children.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Duty

**Author's Note:**

> I assume that if Yakone went through the trouble and expense of plastic surgery, he would also change his name when he went north. Sangilak is an Inuit name meaning "strongest of all," which seems rather fitting, considering his mindset. Sura's name comes from the much-talented anghraine; many thanks!

Sura stares out at the waves. Her sons and husband had loved the water so. She sees again her two sons wrestling and playfighting in the snow, the elder doting on the younger, the younger worshipping the elder. Her husband’s pride and her own on finding they could bend water. The three of them setting out on a hunting trip, all three turning back over their shoulders often and waving until they disappeared over the horizon. She chokes back a sob. There will be no more hunting trips now. No more happy returns.

She remembers as clearly as though she is still there the coarse feel of the walrus hide rope beneath her fingers as she hung up their clothes to dry, and the dawn light streaming across the ice. The sunrise had been gorgeous that day, pink and orange exploding across the sky, and she sang as she worked, flitting from tune to tune. First a cradle song that she had sung to both her sons when they were still round-eyed mites, blinking up at her and waving their tiny hands to try to catch her braids. Then she changed mid-song to a song about the Northern Lights dancing in a girl’s smile, one that Sangilak had sung to her in their courtship. Sura sang, and smiled, and then pushed aside the blanket flapping in the wind and saw two figures coming. Two, instead of three.

The night before she had heard the storm and shut the doors tight against it, but this sense of crushing, sudden grief was no storm. It was an avalanche that roared towards and over her, while she stood helpless and paralyzed. In her head, her heart, pealed the thought _my son! My first-born son!_ But her lips could not utter a sound.

If Noatak’s death had been like an avalanche crushing her, Sangilak’s was like standing on an ice floe in the middle of the sea, with no land in sight. It had been torment to watch him fade day after day, turning away from his food and staring out at the horizon, but what could she do? She, too, could not eat. She, too, watched the horizon, with strangled hope fluttering to life beneath her heart at sunrise and dying at each nightfall.

It doesn’t matter. They are gone.

And isn’t it a wife’s duty to follow her husband wherever he goes? Isn’t it a mother’s duty to follow her children?

Sura wades out into the waves. The water, coming to her ankles first, then to her knees, soaks gradually through her furs and onto her skin. She welcomes it; it reminds her of her husband running his hands reverently over her bare legs on their wedding night, as though he touched the moon.

“Sura?”

She wades out further. The gulls barking sound so much like her sons laughing. Noatak had laughed so little in the final months. Why, oh, why hadn’t she noticed it? Why hadn’t she said anything? Why…

“Sura!”

The water comes up to her shoulders now. This close to her nostrils, the salt tang is so much wilder and stronger. Like blood, she thinks suddenly. Like blood on her husband’s hands, on her sons’ hands, while they clean their kills and the full-bellied moon flashes off their knives and makes the tundra a glittering wonderland. That beauty had killed her son. The storm, had it laughed? The illness in her husband’s veins, had it smiled, to know it tore apart a family?

_“Sura!”_

She goes under.

Sura does not hear the hunters’ shouts as they race for their kayaks, or see them paddling frantically out with smooth, swift strokes to the place where she sank. She does not feel hands tugging at her parka, slapping roughly on her face. She does not hear the crunch of dried sealskin on pebbles as they bring her body in, or the wailings of the village women. She does not see the long-legged boy, already growing so fast, pounding down the beach, his gray eyes wide with an animal anguish and terror that he is weak, he is unwanted, the last person he loves has abandoned him. She does not hear his scream.

_“Mother!”_


End file.
